Background: Currently, there exists no comprehensive and biologically inspired model of speech production that utilizes spiking neuron. Goal: We introduce a speech production model based on a spiking neuron approach called the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF). Using the NEF to model temporal behavior at the neural level in a biologically plausible way, we present a model of the temporal coord...

It is often suggested that languages are likely to ‘compensate’ complexity in one subsystem by simplicity elsewhere. In this paper evidence against this idea is presented by examining several subsystems of the basic phonology in a set of over 600 languages selected to represent genetic and areal diversity. The relationships between elaboration of the syllable canon, the size of segment inventor...

This paper presents a study of the perception of Mandarin disyllabic words by native speakers of German. It examines how speakers of an accent language perceive word stress in words from a tone language. A corpus of 15 sets of words with all possible combinations of the four tones of Mandarin was recorded by a professional speaker. In addition monotonized versions of the words were created. In ...

The most frequently used variables for language rhythm categorisation have been measured for some tonal languages. Cantonese, Mandarin, Thai and Vietnamese are languages which ground their prosodic properties on phonological tones and are supposed to reserve secondary role to stress whose functions are controversially bounded to prominence patterns of constituency. Therefore, a distinctive char...

This paper addresses the validity of the segmental anchoring hypothesis for tonal landmarks (henceforth, SAH) as described in recent work by (among others) Ladd, Faulkner, D., Faulkner, H., & Schepman [1999. Constant ‘segmental’ anchoring of f0 movements under changes in speech rate. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 1543–1554], Ladd [2003. Phonological conditioning of f0 targe...

In this paper we present an approach to modeling emergent syllable systems using simulated evolution of a “vocabulary” of “words.” The model is aimed at testing the general hypothesis that language-universal sound patterns emerge from selection pressures exerted on the system by the perceptual and articulatory constraints of language users. The model is able to distinguish between hypotheses ab...

Modeling phonological units of speech is a critical issue in speech recognition. In this paper, we report our recent development of an overlapping feature-based phonological model which gives long-span contextual dependency. We extend our earlier work by incorporating high-level linguistic constaints in automatic construction of the feature overlapping patterns. The main linguistic information ...

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Speech clarity and coarticulatory effects in standard and dialectal Arabic This study deals with the co-variation of speech clarity and coarticulatory patterns. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of two parameters, the speech style (formal vs. non formal) and the pr...

This paper examines the tonal structure of yes-no questions in Chaha, using the autosegmental-metrical model of intonational phonology. Yes-no questions can be formed in two ways: lengthening the final syllable or attach the question suffix to the final word. They exhibit different F0 patterns at the end of the utterance. We propose that the same underlying tonal structure is realized different...